That the kind of thing that run away to north pole, killing many in its journey.
What would the perfect programming language look like?
- Thread starter iljitsch
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Many years ago my professor in the "Intro to Compilers" course was one of the authors of the GNU Forth compiler. A couple of his grad students were absolute bonkers in Unreal Tournament. I have some painful memories of getting completely pasted in Assault, and by their statements he was even more of a madman in it.
Did you, by chance, refer to this type of thing?
Running Forth from cassette tape on my C64 definitely made me think the language was/is interpreted.
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It can be. It can also be compiled. One of the nice things about Forth is that it's very small... it worked great on 8-bit machines with their limited memory.
Also the design of the language (implicit stack for passing and return ing arguments) makes the compiled/interpreted decision unlikely to cause issues with lexical treatment of variables.
I always had the impression that Forth was amazing for single developers who owned a project, or maybe small teams who worked closely. But was otherwise a write-only language that would not scale to larger teams or larger projects. Convince me otherwise??
Well, it's is the kind of programming language where it is really easy to refactor and extract functions, given that cut/paste is all that takes.
On the other hand, without a namespace and package system, name collisions seem pretty much guaranteed. That said, adding namespaces isn't too difficult.
On the other hand, without a namespace and package system, name collisions seem pretty much guaranteed. That said, adding namespaces isn't too difficult.
I grew up with BBC BASIC, which had IF, THEN and ELSE; as well as named functions and 'procedures'. It entirely avoided the use of GOSUB and GOTO <line number>. It also had REPEAT .. UNTIL. Later version had WHILE.